


Raise Hell

by DarkwingJones



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Blood and Gore, Multi, Non-Hunter Winchesters, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-29
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 17:24:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1866156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkwingJones/pseuds/DarkwingJones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Dean are just a couple of teenage boys on vacation with their father when the world goes to Hell in a handbasket. As they struggle to come to terms with their losses and the drastic changes all around them, they're thrust into a story that's so much bigger than themselves, where flesh-eating monsters are the least of their worries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fright Night

**Author's Note:**

> Just in case it wasn't clear from the tags, this work is going to be gory in places. The same goes for foul language, violence, and a _sharp_ loss of morals all around.
> 
> This work won't center entirely around the Winchesters or Dean/Cas. They're going to be part of something much more complicated than a simple love story. Dean is going to be a main character, but not _the_ main character. Along that same vein, some relationships or tags are being withheld for now so as not to spoil the plot.
> 
> The shit hits the fan pretty suddenly here. **It's only going to get worse.**
> 
> "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." _Dante's Inferno, The Divine Comedy_

John Winchester was an ex-Marine, an engineer, and a single father of two. He was also a friggin’ workaholic, and strict about his sons’ educations; Sam and Dean were gonna make something of themselves or so help him… So Dean did his best to stay out of trouble—having a goddamn ex-Marine for a father was a hell of a good incentive not to do anything stupid—and worked his ass off in school, balancing the ridiculous amount of homework he was given with cleaning up the house and keeping Sam fed while their father slaved away to cover their bills and the mortgage, and to keep his sons looking decent and the fridge stocked. They never wanted for anything, and though there were a few rough patches (like the mornings that Dean and Sam were introduced to 5 a.m. wake-ups and military exercises before _school_ ), John made damn sure that every Thanksgiving was spent cooking with his sons and that Christmas morning dawned on presents beneath the tree.

Their Uncle Bobby—a mechanic—completed their little family, and though he sometimes went on impromptu vacations to ‘brush up on his survival skills’, neither of the Winchester boys could remember an important holiday where their uncle hadn’t been there, eyes smiling beneath the rim of his ball cap and a beer in his hand. As far back as he could recall, Dean had been weaseling his way into his uncle Bobby’s workshop ever since he was old enough to read the fractions on the wrenches, and spent those nights grumbling and cleaning grease out from beneath his fingernails to be presentable to John in the morning. But he was only too eager to get them dirty again—as soon as his homework was finished and Sam was fed, of course. (He never needed to tell Sam to do _his_ homework; the kid was a fuckin’ nerd and he actually seemed to _enjoy_ it.)

When Dean graduated high school with a 4.0 GPA, an SAT score of 1470, and fucking _Honors_ , it seemed like the only one surprised was Dean himself. He stumbled getting up onto the stage and everything was a blur, from walking across to the podium and accepting his diploma to flashing the audience what he was sure was a dumbass grin and almost eating it when he tripped on the hem of his fucking gown getting off the stage. It took his baby brother yanking him into a mammoth hug that damn near splintered his spine to realize, staring over Sam’s head at John looking fit to burst with pride just behind him, that no matter how many times the Winchester patriarch had told him, “Don’t be stupid, Dean,” he’d never once said, “You’re not smart.” _That_ had sent Dean slamming right back to reality, and if Dean’s voice was a little hoarse and his eyes a little misty when Sam finally put him down, well, he could blame it on the strain on his ribs and the lack of air.

Dean declared that he was taking a year off to help take care of Sam and get a job at his uncle Bobby’s garage, hoping to save up enough to furnish his own apartment when he moved out in a year’s time to the MIT campus. Dean Winchester, going to MIT. Who could have seen it coming? Sam, apparently. He’d sent in an application partly as a joke, and partly because Sam had coached him through breathing like he was taking a fucking Lamaze class when Dean had a panic attack the size of the goddamn Chrysler Building when the thought—the absolute _certainty_ , as sure as Dean loved pie—that he would never get into a good college and would spend the rest of his days turning tricks with his pretty-boy face and crashing on his dad’s couch crept into his head and took, festering until it was a raw, pulsing _thing_ in his chest that took him and Sam _weeks_ to uproot and burn to ashes. Under Sam’s careful guidance—mostly, he watched over Dean like a fucking _hawk_ to keep him from turning into a total chicken shit and tossing the apps before he filled them out—Dean sent off applications to Stanford, MIT, CIT, and Berkeley, and when Dean suggested that he should probably apply to their local community college “just to cover all his bases”, Sam had given him the bitchface to end all bitchfaces, and the discussion was over before it ever really began.

When he’d gotten the thick manila envelope in the mail, Dean had sprinted inside bellowing for Sam and John, and it seemed like the moment that the words, “I got into MIT!” left his mouth, Dean was engulfed in vice grip hugs and receiving claps on the back that shook him to his knees. He walked on clouds for weeks and his cheeks hurt for days, especially when he remembered the damp, wobbling smile on Sam’s face as he shoved at Dean and said, “I _told_ you so,” and John’s sudden gruffness when he announced that he was going on a beer-and-burger run to celebrate. Sam always joked that there’d have to be an apocalypse for their father to take the time off of work to go on a vacation, and Dean had to agree with him. Ever since their mom died when Sam was a baby, John had thrown himself wholeheartedly into his work and the Winchester boys had gone on one real, out of state vacation when Dean was eight, and that was only because Bobby closed up the garage to drive him and Sam down to Walt Disney World for a week because Sam had been fucking _obsessed_ with ‘Bud Lideyear’ ever since Dean used his meager allowance savings to buy Sam _Toy Story_ for his fourth birthday. The rest of the time, Bobby took them camping a couple times every summer to teach them how to ‘live off the land’, but that was as good as it got.

Which was why they were both stunned when John came home from work one balmy June night and announced that they were going to take a road trip.

Sam and Dean’s eyebrows nearly flew out into the stratosphere. “A _road trip_?” they asked in unison, and Dean’s brows then samba’d into an expression more like bemused, leaning halfway out of the kitchen with a (totally manly) apron on while he tackled the dishes.

“What’s the occasion?”

“No _occasion_ ,” said John, removing his tie with his usual grimace. “What, a man can’t want to go on a road trip with his sons?”

“Dad, we haven’t even gone to a lake together in, like, six years,” Dean said with a scoff. “You giving up work is like Smeagol giving up the Ring.”

John lifted a brow. “Y’know that expression about looking a gift horse in the mouth?”

Dean frowned, warily prompting, “Yeah?”

“You’re poking me in the teeth, Dean.”

Dean obediently shut his yap.

“But it’s Tuesday,” said Sam, steering the conversation back to the original announcement and wrinkling his nose. “I have _classes_ tomorrow.”

John snorted. “We’re leaving on Thursday, Sammy.”

“I have school on Thursday, too,” Sam pointed out, lifting his brows and affecting one of his trademark bitchfaces that John swore up and down that he’d inherited from their mother.

“And you’re not going, Sam,” John replied, and Dean mentally patted his father on the back for his patient tone. “You can miss a few days of college. It’s not going to kill you.”

“Yeah, Sammy,” said Dean, “it’s _summer_. The professors’ll understand.” Before Sam could protest, Dean stripped off the apron and flopped down onto the couch directly on his younger brother’s legs, nearly making Sam drop the brand new Mac that he’d gotten him for his fifteenth birthday a month ago. Bitchface to level seven! Dean grinned as Sam scowled, lifting himself up to let Sam yank his legs out from under Dean with a huff. “We’ll have all week to ourselves. Go camping like we do with Bobby, do a little fishing, spend time with Dad. Don’t be such a bitch.”

Nine and counting. “I’m not being a bitch, you jerk. Some of us still need to graduate high school.”

Dean gave Sam a flat look. “Sam, you have a 4.5 GPA. You skipped a grade and you’re taking frigging _college courses_. I think you’re set, buddy. Seriously.”

Sam narrowed his eyes and shoved at Dean with his socked foot, his face only softening when Dean laughed. “Whatever, Mister MIT,” he said, twisting around to look over at John with what Dean could only describe as the face of a puppy about to get his belly rubbed. “Where are we going?”

“Down to the Florida Keys,” John replied, his grin almost a triumphant smirk; the biggest hurdle was always going to be convincing Sam.

“ _Awesome_ ,” said Sam, in the same instant that Dean said, “ _Sweet_.” And that was that.

John made a list and printed out six copies: one for each of them, one for the fridge, one for the garage, and one for the glove box of the family’s ‘67 Impala. Meticulous was a word for it. Perfectionist was another. Dean preferred ‘fucking nuts’. John was like a military Santa Claus, checking that list at least once every ten minutes while they were packing until Sam and Dean could recite it backwards and forwards and probably in Pig Latin if they were pressed, rolling their eyes at each other whenever John’s back was turned. They packed all of their camping and survival supplies, a tool kit for the Impala just in case—God forbid—she broke down or something equally unthinkable, clothing, food, their impressive first-aid kit, and—of course—weapons. There was always at least one weapon in the Impala, from the Magnum in the glove box to the shotgun in the trunk. Now that all three Winchesters were going out on the road, John wasn’t taking any chances; they were going out armed to the teeth.

Dean couldn’t blame him. Not after what happened to Mary.

The moment that Dean saw where their trip would take them, he couldn’t suppress a hissed, “ _Yes_ ,” pumping his fist in front of him as he hit the print button. Google Maps said it would take at least thirty hours of nonstop road time to drive the almost two thousand miles between Sioux Falls, North Dakota and the Florida Keys, and the route that Dean picked—one that specifically spent as short a time anywhere near Kansas as humanly possible—led them right near Miami. Surely John wouldn’t mind them swinging by for some quality beach time. After all, Miami Beach was _world famous_ , and if Dean could make John forget Horatio Caine, they might just have a shot. (And if they just _happened_ to end up at a topless beach instead, well, it was an honest mistake; the internet wasn’t always an _entirely_ reliable source of information.)

* * *

**Thursday, June 26, 2014**

8 a.m. Thursday morning found the Winchesters clambering into the Impala, John and Dean in the front and Sam slouched in the back seat with his nose in a book. Dean spared it a glance and frowned at the dour-faced girl on the cover, eerie purple eyes staring out at him. The title read _Poison_ , and Dean was halfway tempted to make a crack at Sam for reading what looked like a sappy teenage angst novel… but he didn’t want to bug Sam so soon after they’d hauled their asses into the car. (No, he had to space these things out. Give Sam some recovery time between questioning his possession of a man card.) Instead, he turned back around and bopped his head along to _Highway to Hell_ , shamelessly singing along with AC/DC while John huffed with amusement and Sam fondly rolled his eyes, shaking his head and delving deeper into his story.

It took a few songs, but eventually John joined in, fingers drumming on the steering wheel of the Impala as they coasted along the interstate, windows down and _We Will Rock You_ blaring through the speakers. Even Sam got into it, pounding the heel of his boot on the floor of the Impala and beatboxing along with the boom-boom-clap, the corners of his lips turned up. Even then, Dean could tell that this was a moment that he’d remember for the rest of his life, from Sam’s goofy grin to the way that John really let loose, belting out the lyrics and looking happier than Dean had seen him in years. Even if this trip sucked, even if they never did this again, this was a moment that he’d treasure, committing the faces of his brother and his father to memory and fervently hoping that it never failed him.

* * *

**Saturday, June 28, 2014**

“This blows,” grumbled Dean, hanging off of the back of a threadbare, overstuffed armchair and looking out past the filmy curtains of the cheap motel room that the Winchesters had checked into the moment the fucking _typhoon_ outside started really gearing up just outside of Georgia, utterly decimating their plans to sleep under the stars. He had his headphones around his neck; Whitesnake pulsed against his jugular from his iPod—the only piece of technology either boy was allowed to take on this trip meant to disconnect—and there was nothing outside but the cement of the parking lot, less than a handful of cars, and scraggly trees. Hundreds of them. Hundreds of trees and nothing else, all static and smudged around the edges from the absolutely _pouring_ rain. “It’s like the fuckin’ _Day After Tomorrow_ out there, man. _And_ this place doesn’t have a t.v. What kinda sick fuck doesn’t put a t.v. in a motel room in the middle of Buttfuck, Egypt?”

Sam made a noncommittal noise, turning the page of his book—a new one this time, titled _Davis’s Drug Guide for Nurses_ —before he said, “You could always read a _book_.”

Dean glared over his shoulder at his brother, tone mocking when he said, “I can’t ‘read a book’, Brainiac.” He sucked his teeth and turned back to the window, grumbling, “I’m too fuckin’ antsy.”

“It might help,” Sam gently insisted, and he used that tone that rankled Dean—the one that made him feel like Sam was talking to him like he would talk to placate a hysterical toddler in the sandbox. “I can lend you one of mine. It’ll help to get you out of your own head for a while.”

“Yeah, thanks, Dr. Phil,” muttered Dean, rolling his eyes in exasperation.

Sam rolled his right back, though neither of them saw the other do it. “Well, if you’re not gonna read, at least stop whining so _I_ can.”

This earned Sam a sharp look over Dean’s shoulder, and the elder Winchester brother said, “I’m not _whining_.”

Sam heaved a long-suffering sigh. “You’re totally whining, Dean. Now shut up so I can read this stupid book. I wanna get through the P’s before I die of old age.”

“Bitch.”

“Jerk.”

This exchange, more than anything, was what took the edge off of Dean’s anxiety, and when he turned back around to look past the curtains, the line of his shoulders was just that little bit more relaxed. They slumped altogether with relief when the Impala drove into his line of sight, and his breathing stuttered with the sudden release of pressure on his chest that he hadn’t even realized was there. John was inching along in the rain and Dean couldn’t help but smile, looking over his shoulder again as he announced, “Dad’s back.”

“I noticed,” Sam replied, amusement and warmth apparent in those two words as he smiled behind the pages of his book.

Dean watched the blur that was John shift onto the passenger seat and felt a burst of affection for his father; the rain was falling diagonally, and if John opened the driver’s side door, the interior of the Impala was _fucked_. A black umbrella popped open at almost the same instant that the passenger’s side door did, and Dean couldn’t hold back his snort. He could almost hear his father muttering under his breath and swearing as he tried to move the umbrella past the door so that it could open all of the way. After three full seconds of fruitless struggling, Dean’s snorting turned into full-blown, gut-busting laughter, and Sam scrambled up from his creaky motel bed to see what it was that Dean was damn near pissing himself over.

“Colonel Winchester, ladies and gentlemen,” Sam gravely announced around a grin when he all but crushed Dean against the back of the armchair, and Dean snorted again, shoving at his little brother.

“Go back to bed before he comes in,” said Dean with another shove when his trunk of a brother didn’t move, adding, “You know how he gets when he thinks we’re ganging up on him.”

Sam scoffed and rolled his eyes as he headed back to his bed, saying, _sotto voce_ , “Oh, yeah, he’s a regular ball of sunshine.”

Dean was still laughing by the time that John staggered into the motel room with their consolatory fast food.

No one was at the window when the smudges in the woods started to move.

* * *

**Monday, June 30, 2014**

Everything always went to hell on Mondays.

Sunday had been great. After the torrential downpour outside of Georgia finally let up, the Winchesters checked out and piled into the Impala, Sam and Dean chattering excitedly. It took almost an hour, but John begrudgingly agreed to take the detour to the beaches, and Dean mentally preened over his foresight to use the downpour _and_ his crummy Father’s Day (spent on the couch drinking beer) to get John to treat them all to sand, sun, and skin (though the man insisted on going only to clearly-labeled beaches, which neatly foiled Dean’s plans for a topless one). By the time they’d made it to a hotel, checked in, dragged John away from the nearest newspaper vending machine— _everyone_ had to disconnect, on this trip—and gotten to Miami Beach, the throng of people that the Winchesters expected was curiously absent. Sure, the beach still had its fair share of people—more than they were used to seeing around any body of water—but it wasn’t like the tin of sardines that the media always made it out to be.

The water, of course, had been perfect. Perfect waves, perfect temperature, perfect clarity.  John might as well have been a merman, he swam so well, popping up in deeper water each time he surfaced to clear the fog out of his diving mask. Sam spent a good portion of his time building a sand castle that looked almost like the Taj Mahal, oblivious to the appreciative stares of two older girls until Dean elbowed him sharply in the ribs and subtly flicked his eyes toward their nearby towels where they lay soaking up the sun. Sam went fifty shades of awkward and waved, earning himself a round of giggling that had him burning up to the tips of his ears until he looked away. Dean was caught between wanting to slap his hand over his face in exasperation and pulling a Will Smith and standing aside to gesture grandly at his baby brother until they actually approached him, but magnanimously decided against doing either. Instead, he yanked Sam away from his little art project—being careful not to knock it over, of course—and led his protesting little brother over to the ladies in question.

Sunday night found them on their hotel room beds—their own room, this time, since the single beds were too narrow to share without somebody ending up enthusiastically greeting the floor; John had his own room, which he’d taken reluctantly, and not before pulling Dean aside and ordering him to take care of Sam—with names and phone numbers scrawled messily on their hands, and Sam with this goofy little smile that would disappear for a minute or two when he busied himself but would inevitably come back whenever he looked at his palm. Dean thought it was adorable, but he teased the shit out of Sam on principle, especially after the third time that Sam asked Dean if he was _sure_ that the time frame he had given him to call wasn’t creepy-soon or way too late. Unlike the motel, this hotel _did_ have a television, so he and Sam spent a good portion of the evening and late night channel-surfing from movie to movie. Halfway through _Independence Day_ some time past two in the morning, Sam muted the television and cocked his head like a spaniel, which was the only reason that Dean didn’t flip the fuck out and throw something at him for doing something so heinous.

“Do you hear that?” Sam whispered, the light from explosions on the television casting fiery shadows on his face as he turned his head toward the door.

Dean frowned. “No.” And then he did. Something high and sharp and splintered—something that smacked of desperation and fear. Someone was screaming. It took only a moment for Dean to jerk up onto his feet and firmly murmur, “Sammy, stay here.”

“Dean—“

“Stay _behind_ me, Sam,” Dean said, loud enough to drive the message home. Sam closed his mouth with a click as Dean took his Glock out of the duffel bag beside his bed, nodding his approval when Sam wordlessly fetched John’s Beretta—the only gun that he was truly comfortable with. Dean briefly inspected the magazine in his hand before sliding it home in his pistol, standing behind the door—never to the side—as he unlocked it and eased it open.

Nothing happened.

“Dean.” A warning. A reminder. A plea.

“Yeah,” Dean whispered back, and then he forced the door open the rest of the way.

Dean lifted his gun and adjusted his grip, looking both ways down the corridor for immediate threats before he craned his neck to look toward the screaming. The hotel hallway was undisturbed, save for light playing on the wall on the far end from an open door, where the screaming—and the sounds of struggle, Dean could hear—streamed out of. Dean stepped out of the room. Abruptly, the screaming stopped. The sudden silence unsettled Dean more than the noise, and he wet his lips before he continued down the corridor, his breathing loud in his ears and his toes sensitive to the scratchy fibers of the carpet beneath him. He heard Sam step out behind him and swore, hissing, “ _Sam_.”

“ _Dean_?” asked his brother, in entirely too innocent tones.

“Get back in the room.”

“No,” said Sam, affronted.

“ _Sam_.”

“ _Dean_.”

Dean growled. “Damn it, Sam, it’s not _funny_ —“ They were halfway down the corridor when the sound of breaking glass stopped them short, and Dean whipped his head back around toward the way they’d come. Sam was stock still behind him, jaw slack with shock. That’d come from their father’s room across from theirs, and so did the gunfire that followed an instant later. Dean made an aborted movement toward John’s door before Sam sucked in a breath like a hiss, and his wide eyes, staring over Dean’s shoulder, told Dean more than words could. Dean turned back around. Someone had stepped out of the room at the end of the hall. Dean felt his blood freeze in his veins when he took in the sight before him, though his brain vehemently refused to accept that what his eyes were sending it could be true.

The light from that room—from the television, his mind inanely supplied—was flickering shadows over the pale ropes of intestines that dangled out of the hollow carved out of the woman’s torso. What few ribs remained gleamed white and wet around the tattered remains of lungs and the absence of a heart, and even as Dean watched—fighting the bile rising in the back of his throat—one of the ribs, fractured nearly to splinters, fell away from the cage with a carpet-muffled thump that may as well have been an explosion, for all Dean jolted. Behind him, Sam choked around a whisper of his name, and Dean reflexively reached back to grab his little brother’s hip with his free hand, squeezing hard. This movement was apparently enough to grab the woman’s attention, and violently bloodshot eyes skittered along the carpet and walls before landing on the Winchester brothers.

“Sam,” said Dean, and he was distantly proud of how steady his voice was when he raised his Glock, “run.”


	2. Pull The Trigger, Piglet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Warning: character death. Twice.**

Sam hesitated.

Dean fired.

The blast was almost lost among the gunshots coming from John’s room, the continuance of which Dean found only a modicum of comfort in. The woman at the end of the hall jerked when his bullet hit her in the chest, half-lidded bloodshot eyes widening and truly _seeing_ Dean for the first time. All at once, her face lost the spellbound, disoriented look of someone just woken from deep sleep, any innocence death had left her warping into a fearsome, inhuman snarl as she opened her mouth and _screeched_. Blood and spittle flew out onto the carpet from needle-sharp teeth as the sound washed over Dean, setting his every hair on end and his teeth to grinding. It was also the only warning they got before she broke into a dead sprint, her entrails flicking and slapping against her legs as she made her way toward them at a pace that really shouldn’t have been possible, given the state of her.

 _Shit_.

“ _Run_!” Dean bellowed, hurrying backwards as Sam wrenched away from him and thundered back toward their room. Dean shot again, once, twice, and the second caught her right between the eyes, snapping her head back and causing her to slide on the slippery slickness of her own guts, skidding to a stop just shy of Dean’s ankles. Dean danced back, away from her, nearly tripping on the legs of his low-hanging sweatpants. All around them came the sound of breaking windows and screaming, but mostly to Dean’s right—from the outside of the hotel building.

Behind Dean, Sam pounded on John’s door, across and two doors down from theirs. “Dad?” he called, voice tight and urgent.

“Get inside, Sam!” John shouted back, and then he swore as something in his room crashed and broke. More gun fire. “They’re coming through the windows! Shoot them in the head! I’ll come get you when it’s safe!”

“’ _Them_ ’?” asked Dean, and then he wished he hadn’t. Three more zombies—they were zombies, his right brain told him, though the logical left told him he was _fucking high_ —stepped out of the room at the end of the hall and swiveled their heads toward Sam and Dean, and Dean could almost hear the blood draining from his face. “Oh, fuck,” he whispered, bumping into Sam and reaching back to shove Sam toward the door to their room. At the end of the hall, the zombies broke into a run, snarling and keening and making more noises that should never come from a human throat. Below that, apart from the screams, Dean heard the first splintering pounds of bodies slamming against the hotel room doors, and he knew—in the instant it took him to register it—that more of them were seconds from spilling into the corridor. Terror threatened to choke him—threatened to root him to the spot—but Dean shoved it down, down, down into a padlocked box in his mind, and he forced himself into autopilot. Panic wouldn’t help right now. Fear was for later. Right now, Dean needed to _move_.

So he did.

Four shots, two down, and Dean allowed himself to be yanked into his hotel room, throwing the door behind him an instant before the third zombie crashed into it. For a few eternal seconds, Dean struggled to close the door on the thing’s stump of an arm, narrowly avoiding having his eye gouged out by a jagged edge of bone when it tried to shift its grip. Then Sam stepped up to the open side of the door, face white to the lips, and pulled the trigger of the Beretta. Dean had never been so glad to hear the slamming of a door in all of his life, and he hastily did up the locks, looking over his shoulder at his brother. “Sam, get the bed.”

Sam only blinked owlishly, gun lowering in trembling hands, and a sickly green bled into the paleness of his face. Dean’s eyes widened when Sam’s breathing rattled, and he hastened to snap his fingers in front of his brother’s face before he could throw up. “Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey,” said Dean, tone firm but not unkind when Sam’s hazel eyes jerked up to meet Dean’s own green. (He didn’t have the heart to be cruel when Sam looked three seconds away from a nervous breakdown.) “None of that. Barricade now. Puke later. Okay?” Sam’s Adam’s apple wobbled around a swallow, and then he started when the sound of splintering wood came from somewhere outside, followed quickly by a desperate, hungry wail. “Sam,” said Dean, setting his hand on his brother’s shoulder and squeezing. “Barricade now. Puke and panic _later_. _Okay_?”

Sam managed to nod, and then nodded once more, seeming to come back to himself a little. It would have to be enough. “Yeah,” he said, though his voice shook. “Okay.” Both Sam and Dean moved to take hold of one of the beds, being careful to make as little noise as physically possible as they carried it over to the door. They kept shooting nervous glances toward the door and the windows, as if either would explode in the next second (which was really fucking likely). Dean didn’t like the feel of just a bed against the door, so he and Sam quietly hauled one of the (stupidly heavy) bedside tables over to it, pressing it against the bottom of the bed so it wouldn’t fall at the slightest knock. A second after they’d gotten the table situated, Dean realized that ‘the slightest knock’ was a fool’s hope; the bedside table _vibrated_ with the force that struck their hotel room door, and he and Sam simultaneously scrambled to brace it, two pairs of eyes going wide.

On the second strike, the lights went out, plunging them both into darkness.

Dean swore creatively and at length under his breath, weathering the next several blows with his jaw clenched tight. In the meantime, their eyes adjusted to the meager light threading in through the windows from a street lamp in the middle of the parking lot. Outside in the street below, they could hear screaming and tires screeching, inhuman yowling noises, and the sounds of what must have been cars crashing and people dying. Dean looked across at Sam and saw that his brother’s eyes were luminous with terror, and he knew that his own probably didn’t look much different. The latest hits were met with the sound of cracking wood, and Dean’s grip on his gun went white-knuckled. Countless bodies and hands were striking at the walls and the door, and as Dean watched, a fist slammed through the drywall on Sam’s side of the room, making the younger Winchester whip his head around. Dean’s mouth went cotton-dry as the implications struck him right in the gut. The walls would give out just as surely as the door was. No amount of barricading would hold them back—would keep his brother safe. They were going to die.

The zombie that had broken through the wall tried to tear away the drywall with a hand that was too fractured to do much more than weakly tear at the pieces of drywall already knocked loose from the impact with knuckles broken to bits and a thumb that hung limply against its wrist, but that didn’t stop it from loosing a savage, triumphant cry; to Dean, it sounded like a predator that had sensed that its prey wasn’t so far away anymore, and the very thought turned his stomach so violently that he had to swallow several times before he could chance breathing through his mouth. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as his eyes drifted toward his Glock, weighing the options. He didn’t know how many of them were out there. It was just him and Sam in this room, and while they had an impressive amount of ammo in the duffel bag, the fact remained that there could be dozens of zombies in the hallway, and they were only two people; John had insisted taking them shooting since they were twelve each, but he’d focused more on torso shots than head shots. Dean was moderately better at them than Sam, but it was still a far cry from the absolute _precision_ that they would need to take on that many zombies without being overwhelmed.

For one terrifying instant, Dean seriously contemplated mercy-killing Sam and shooting himself to spare them from being torn apart alive.

And then the gunshots started.

Both of the Winchester brothers jerked their heads up at the sounds, and Dean only faintly registered the rasp of the arm in the wall sliding out of the hole from his peripheral vision. For an agonizingly long second or two, the only sounds to be heard were gunshots, meaty thuds, and the sudden silencing of several snarling voices outside. And then another voice went above the others, loud and human and _fierce_.  Senseless _relief_ swept through Dean when John Winchester bellowed, “Hey, you ugly motherfuckers!” only to be crushed by frigid, choking despair when John’s voice moved away, shouting, “Over here!”

 _No_.

“Dad!” cried Dean in a splintered voice, dropping his gun and scrambling up to head for the hole in the wall. “Dad, _don’t_!”

“Shut up, Dean,” snapped John, and Sam, coming up behind him, barely ducked out of the way in time when another arm shoved its way through the hole in the wall. A gunshot, and the arm fell away again.

“Dad,” said Sam, voice breaking so keenly that Dean felt as though he’d just been shoved off the tallest building in Miami, stomach lurching and flipping topsy-turvy in his gut. His head whipped up in the direction of the newest noise; the zombies seemed to have decided that John was the easier target and stumbled over the corpses of the fallen, screeching and snarling. Dean felt his head shaking even as helplessness overtook him, and every one of John’s footfalls—sharp and fading like the beats of a dying heart—felt like a physical blow. He heard gunfire trail downstairs, down to where the lobby must have been, and then silence in the hotel that struck as loud as a thunderclap, leaving them only with distant car alarms and fading screams for company.

The smell of vomit stung sharply in his nose. Dean felt as though he were looking through someone else’s eyes as he watched Sam throw up in the corner of the room, shoulders heaving with harsh, strangled sobs. That was what brought Dean back to himself enough to lead Sam into the bathroom, determinedly coaxing Sam through the routine of washing out his mouth and brushing his teeth—a process that Sam latched onto like a drowning man clung to flotsam. For his part, Dean threw himself into the role of guardian with as much fervor as he could muster given the circumstances, and then set upon getting Sam to rest. Neither of them felt entirely safe sleeping in the remaining bed, seeing as it was near the windows. Instead, Dean hauled the mattress off and placed it on the floor by the door, bundling Sam up in the thin sheets and sitting with his back against the bedside table and his hand firmly around his little brother’s, the way they used to hold hands whenever Sam had a nightmare as a kid. They’d stopped doing that when Sam was around ten, but neither of them questioned the need for comfort now—neither of them were ‘too grown up’ for this shit.

Dawn was slow in coming. Dean watched flames flickering through the windows as Sam drifted in and out of consciousness. Every time that Sam woke--whether through nightmares or noises around them or the explosions that lit up the windows or rumbled throughout the city just past the glass--there was always a small spark of hope in his eyes, briefly bringing life to the bleak, empty desolation that had settled in them when he’d gone into shock. He had no doubt that Sam hoped that it had all been a terrible dream; Dean felt a little piece of himself chip away and die whenever the light in Sam’s eyes snuffed itself out when the memories came back to him, and then Sam would sigh, close his eyes, and curl around Dean’s hand like a lifeline,until exhaustion pulled him under again and swept his tremors away. Dean himself was too paranoid to sleep, so he watched the windows even when there had been nothing to watch, and thus went into a sort of waking sleep; he fell into a stillness so profound that he could hear the beating of his heart and the working of his lungs, and Sam’s soft sleep-breaths and the rustle of Sam’s skin against the fabric of the sheets were as loud as the surf pounding against a cliffside and the roar of a chainsaw. Every little foreign sound—real or imagined—tore Dean out his trance, his hand darting for the Glock balanced on his knee and his ears straining until he relaxed against the bedside table once more.

So it went, over and over, until sunrise filled the room with enough light to move by. Dean woke Sam as gently as he could, warm, clammy hands parting for the first time in hours as the Winchesters dressed and packed as quietly as possible. They each took apart and cleaned their guns before carefully reloading the magazines, and then listened at the hole in the wall for several tense, silent minutes before wordlessly agreeing to remove the barricade. Removing the mattress from against the door was a tense affair for several reasons, not the least of which being the discovery of the long, jagged, vertical crack in the door that divided the wood almost entirely down the middle. Dean could see clear through to the far wall through the crack, and for the first time, he realized just how close he and Sam had really come to being zombie chow.

Then he flinched, thinking of John, and quickly shoved that thought in that padlocked box.

The second meaningful discovery was that the carpet by the door—and, thus, the bottom of the mattress—was soaked through with drying, tacky blood. The third discovery was the smell. Aside from the smell of stale vomit—the source of which Sam resolutely refused to even acknowledge—and the musty smell of a warming room sans air conditioning, there was the sharp, nauseating smell of drying blood and shit outside, along with several subtle, equally disgusting nuances that Dean had never smelled before but was certain came from multiple ruptured internal organs and spilled bodily fluids. He made Sam open the door while he took the opening end, Glock in hand and aimed for a headshot. The door came open easily, propelled into the room by the two corpses that had been pushed up against it when they fell. Sam jumped back when one of them—the remains of a man missing his lower jaw and one of his eyes—rolled over and into the room, the long, cottony snake of his tongue unsticking from the roof of his mouth and lolling grotesquely into the hole in his throat. Neither of them could restrain a whispered oath, and Sam looked away on the pretense of adjusting the strap of his duffel bag. Dean couldn’t blame him.

Sunlight from the broken hotel room doors streamed into the corridor outside, beating back some of the gloom and making Dean feel a little more confident about stepping out; at least he wouldn’t be _too_ fucking blind out there. Sam stopped him before he could leave the room, though, and Dean watched with equal parts wariness and curiosity as his younger brother stepped forward with a wire clothes hanger that he’d found in the tiny closet in their room and unwound, poking at each one of the dozen or so corpses around the door with a grimace that told Dean that he would rather walk a tightrope naked over a pit of lava than stick a pointy bit of metal into the chalky, blood-drained masses of flesh piled around them. None of the zombies stirred, and some of the tension in their shoulders leeched away. But only some.

Dean carefully stepped over the bodies in front of the door, holding out his free hand to help Sam do the same. His baby brother was growing, that much couldn’t be denied, but he hadn’t, Dean thought with a stifled pang for John, filled out enough to step the way that Dean had without losing his balance and falling into one of the zombies’ squelching embraces. (The knowledge that John wasn’t alive to see Sam grow up struck him just before the fact that Sam might not live much longer to do any more of that growing did, and Dean quickly stamped both the thoughts and the emotions they wrought down into the box.) Their first stop was John’s room, and it was with a growing sense of mingled horror and admiration that they poked at and stepped over the bodies of over a half dozen more corpses, advancing further into the room.

The television was toppled and broken, crushing the back of one of the dead zombies’ heads and littering the carpet with shards of glass and bone that mingled with congealed blood and bits of half-shriveled brain matter. Dean’s heart sank into his stomach when he realized that John had left his own bags for Sam and Dean to pick up when—not _if_ , _when_ —he’d made sure that they were out of harm’s way. All of John’s clothing lay scattered along the floor and the bed; the only things that John had hastily shoved back into his bags were the weapons and ammunition that he hadn’t taken with him on his suicide—Dean’s mind momentarily ground to a halt over the word before kicking back up again like a temperamental computer—run. Only three items lay on the bedside table, and Dean’s composure took a sharp, cracking blow when he took them in: on the left, the Impala’s keys; on the right, John and Mary’s wedding rings.

That settled it; when John had left this room, he had never intended to come back alive.

It took Dean a moment to realize that the sharp, ragged inhalation he heard had come from his own mouth, and he clenched his teeth to keep himself from doing something like bursting into sobs. His eyes stung as he shoved the keys and the rings into his pockets, but he couldn’t break down now. For all they knew, there were zombies in all of the rooms from John’s on out, and he couldn’t afford a second of weakness, not with danger almost literally lurking around every corner—not with Sam under his care. He was made Parent the moment that these fuckers had torn the title of Son from them, and he’d be damned if he let them take Brother away from them, too. It was with this new, grim determination that Dean tossed his anguish into the box and lashed chains around it, the whispering rush of the mental links echoing the muffled, metallic clinking of the loose bullets in the bag that he shouldered. The latter meant that he almost missed what Sam whispered. Almost.

“There are more of them.”

Dean looked up from the bed as he took up John’s second, empty bag—knowing that they would need it for supplies, if nothing else—and looked across at Sam, standing by the window and looking out. Everything about his brother _screamed_ ‘emotional withdrawal’; his expression was shuttered and his lips were set in a thin line, and if Dean looked close enough, he could see the shadows streaking like dark comets across the distant wastelands that were his brother’s eyes. He restrained the urge to say that _of course_ there were more zombies outside, partly because he couldn’t bring himself to verbally strike out at Sam like he usually did, and partly because Sam was looking directly down from the window, not out into the streets beyond. Dean frowned and quietly crossed the room, moving slowly when he went to the window so that he didn’t draw any unnecessary attention from outside.

Almost immediately, he saw what it was that Sam had been talking about: below them, just beneath the window, were another half-dozen bodies, split and mangled against the concrete in front of the hotel. Dean felt a sudden, vicious pride well up just beneath his sternum, and he let it bloom. _John_ had killed all of these monsters. _John_ had fought tooth and nail and _won_ —won in all of the ways that mattered to _John_ —and Dean wasn’t about to let his death—his _victory_ —go to waste. He reached up and set his hand on Sam’s shoulder, feeling his brother flinch beneath his fingers and squeezing as if he could transfer strength through touch alone. Sam tore his eyes away from the window and looked up at Dean, and for a moment, Dean saw flashes of the hate and the hurt that Sam was struggling to cope with in his brother’s too-moist eyes. Dean could only attempt a bracing smile, though he suspected it looked as much like a smile as Barney looked like a bona-fide T-Rex.

“Let’s go.”

Sam closed his eyes, visibly gathered himself up again, and nodded. Dean wound his arm around Sam’s shoulders, and Sam tucked his own around Dean’s waist, fingers clenching in Dean’s shirt. As one, the Winchesters turned and left the room. Unlike John, who knew that death would claim him once he stepped out of its boundaries, Sam and Dean left with the knowledge that no force on Earth could make them return.

Neither looked back.

The trek downstairs took longer than it normally would, for obvious reasons. Dean refused to let Sam past any doorways without thoroughly scoping out the rooms first, and they didn’t want to make any unnecessary noise by hurrying. More than one broken body littered the darkened staircase, and every time that the beams from their flashlights touched one, Dean was relieved—for a moment—to see that it wasn’t John. Only one of the zombies stirred when they got near it, but its neck was broken and had been crushed (by what Dean guessed was the baseball bat in the death grip of a poor bastard nearby), and it could do little more than make soft, wheezing noises of desperation and snap its jaws as they skirted around it. For a moment, Dean watched it. Its body gave a series of small, aborted twitches, easy to miss unless you were looking for them; even with the nerves in its neck crushed like powder, it was still trying to move. The body as a whole was too much to hope for, apparently, but the head was like a snake’s, still capable of delivering a nasty bite probably even after decapitation. The only safe bet, then, was to destroy the brain. He made these observations with near-clinical detachment, and it was with this same detachment that he made the decision not to shoot the thing; despite the hate that churned deep in the core of him, he knew that the sound of a gunshot would bring more trouble than one moment of vengeance was worth. They continued down the stairs.

The staircase let them out just to the side of the lobby, and it was with great trepidation that Dean crept out into the sunlight, only allowing Sam to step out once he felt certain that the coast was clear. The lobby was a fucking mess, littered with corpses and paper and glass, pools and streaks of blood and viscera marring the pristine paleness of the walls and tiles. As they made their way to the back of the hotel, they passed a few doors labeled Employees Only; one of them shook impressively but held when they walked past it, and Dean was thankful for both the strength of the wood and its thickness, muffling the unearthly sounds from the zombie (or zombies) on the other side. The parking lot, like the lobby, was mercifully lacking in the ‘ravenous undead’ department, and Dean once again led the way out past the door, moving half-crouched and skirting around any bodies they came across. He only allowed himself to relax when he and Sam made it into the Impala, closing the doors behind them as firmly as they dared. Only when he turned the engine over did the sensation crawl over him like a nest of spiders; it had been almost too easy to get to the Impala. Nothing had stopped them. Nothing had even slowed them down. Dean frowned as he twisted around to look behind the Impala to start backing the car out of its parking space, remembering a wise man’s words about gift horses.

And that was when John Winchester reached in and grabbed Sam.

Sam screamed as his head was yanked back, and only the awkward angle at which John’s arm came in over the half-lowered back passenger window—and the way that said arm seemed to be held together with sinew and spite alone—saved his brother from having his own neck broken like the zombie Dean had contemplated shooting in the stairwell. Dean knew he was gaping, eyes wide and jaw slack, but he couldn’t make himself _move_ ; one half of his mind was screaming at him to shoot, and the other was screaming that this was _his father_ just as loudly. But it wasn’t his father, thought the first half of Dean, as the zombie-formerly-known-as-John-Winchester snarled and snapped its jaws, teeth gleaming in the sunlight. There wasn’t much skin left on it at this point, and certainly no internal organs could have survived the absolute pitting that had occurred to the torso that smeared gore along the side of the Impala, but Dean would have known his father anywhere, from the familiar crease in what was left of the zombie’s brow to the shape of the hand fisted in Sam’s hair.

None of that kept the sob from bursting past his lips.

“Dean!” screamed Sam, scrambling for purchase and crying out as John yanked again. His fingers clawed at the dash, at the assist handle above his door, at Dean’s clothes. Tears of pain leaked from the corners of Sam’s eyes, and Dean didn’t need a mirror to tell him that tears were welling up in his own.

“I’m sorry,” Dean hissed through clenched teeth, lifting his Glock.

John shifted his position and yanked again, and the new leverage nearly tore Sam out of his seat. “ _Dean_!”

Dean squinted against the urge to close his eyes, the shift making the tears gathered in them slide down his face. He would shoot with his eyes open; he owed John that much. John snarled as though in defiance of Dean’s thoughts, and Dean reached up, steadying his shaking gun with his other hand. “I’m sorry!” he shouted again, his voice breaking.

Sam screamed.

Dean fired.


	3. It's Terror Time Again

For a long moment, there was nothing but the sound of ragged breathing in the car. Sam curled up with his head between his knees and his hands on his head, trembling fingers searching out the bald spot that slowly oozed miniscule beads of blood onto his scalp. John had taken a good chunk of hair with him when he’d fallen, strands gleaming like gold thread in the sunlight between his clenched fingers before his fist hit the edge of the window as he’d jerked back with the force of the gunshot, and then he’d fallen away as though he’d never been there, leaving only smears of blood along the back window. Dean could barely hear over his pulse pounding in his ears. Sam peeled his face away from his knees and looked up at Dean with something like betrayal in his eyes, and then his brows pinched, and the betrayal was replaced by a calculating sort of concern. Dean felt as though he would pass out at any moment, and he knew that it was because he was hyperventilating, just as he knew that he couldn’t stop. When comprehension made Sam’s eyes open wide, Dean felt both his heart and his lungs seize, and he wondered—suddenly, deliriously—if that was what dying felt like.

Voice quaking, Dean choked, “Sam, don’t—“

But it was too late. Sam twisted around in his seat and looked out through the window, and Dean saw the exact moment that his brother recognized the corpse beside the Impala in the way that Sam flinched and vibrated into stillness, like a gong being struck. A noise somewhere between a sob and a keen clawed its way up Sam’s throat, the sound pinched with anguish and almost being drowned out by the approaching snarls and footfalls. Dean swore and turned back around to pull the Impala out of the parking space, dropping the Glock onto his lap and ignoring Sam’s despairing moan—and the lurching of his own stomach—when the right front tire rolled over some part of John that he didn’t care to identify. He shifted gears with more force than strictly necessary, wrapping his trembling hands around the steering wheel until his knuckles went white. Peeling out of the parking lot wasn’t the smoothest of maneuvers, but Dean thought he could be excused; he didn’t think that very many people had ever had to deal with the sudden appearance of a group of zombies hell-bent on stopping their car.

Almost immediately, Dean knew that they couldn’t do this for long. The only zombies that fell away from them were the ones whose legs were compromised, which still left over half of them chasing the Impala at a dead run. Dean swore as he swerved around another zombie that crawled out from behind the wreckage of an overturned car, lifting his eyes to the rearview mirror. He could hear their snarling behind him just as keenly as he could hear Sam’s lurching sobs beside him, and something else beneath all of that. Three streets and another five zombies added to the pack later, Dean realized what it was: screaming and howling. He was, essentially, listening to some great hunt, where humans were the deer and the zombies the wolves. The thought made his stomach turn and his mouth water in preparation for vomiting, but he reined the urge in and threw it into the box.

Safety first. Puke and panic later.

With a quick, flicking glance, Dean determined that his side of the car was safe—or as safe as it could be, given the circumstances—and cracked his window open. Almost immediately, the screaming from outside became louder. Sam’s side was facing the beach, while Dean’s was closer to the city; the zombies must have followed their prey in, since no one would run into the water to escape a threat like that. That meant that going any deeper into the city would be suicide, and staying near the outskirts and the beaches would be their safest bet. _If_ they could shake off the zombies behind them, of course.

Dean was so preoccupied with this line of thought that he almost didn’t stop in time to avoid hitting the blood-drenched old man who rushed into the middle of the street.

The Impala’s tires screeched as Dean hit the brakes, and Sam cried out and swore when he went lurching forward, hastily bracing himself on the dash. Dean flicked his eyes to the rearview mirror and slapped his hand against Sam’s bicep, saying, “Sammy, get the window.” Dean moved to roll up his own, but he paused, straining his ears over the screaming. All at once, he whipped his head around, gaping at the man in the middle of the street. He was talking. He was _alive_.

“ _¡Auxilio!_ ” the old man sobbed, tears streaking down through the grime on his sun-weathered face as he held out a bundle in a bloodstained bedsheet, a tiny arm dangling out from beneath it and a shock of dark hair peeking out from above. “ _Por favor, ayundenlo._ ”

“Sam,” said Dean, grabbing onto the back of his little brother’s jacket. “Sam, what’s he saying?”

“What?” asked Sam, twisting around to frown up at Dean while he finished rolling up the back window.

“The guy in the middle of the—he’s speaking Spanish, Sam, help me out here.”

Sam sat up without a moment’s pause, red-rimmed and swollen eyes landing on the man in the street, ears trying to translate his torrent of Spanish; Dean knew it was bad when Sam’s frown deepened.

“ _¡Mi nietecito! Por favor. Cojanlo, por favor._ _¡Ayudenlo, te suplico!_ ” the man had been saying while approaching the Impala, and Sam looked stricken when he looked up at Dean.

“I think he’s saying that’s his grandson.”

Dean swore, reaching back with a fumbling hand to unlock the back door and looking desperately into the rearview mirror. “Tell him to get his ass in the car.” The zombies were still back there, and they had maybe seven seconds before they were on the Impala—ten, tops.

“ _¡Vete aquí!_ ” shouted Sam, desperately waving the man over. “ _¡Apurar!_ ”

“ _Gracias_ ,” sobbed the old man around a smile, hurrying over to the door that Sam opened for him as the bundle stirred in his arms. “ _Ay, gracias. Gracia_ —“ And then the little boy bit savagely into his neck, taking skin and muscle with him as the man screamed and fell onto his knees, dropping the snarling, chewing bundle as blood sprayed dark across Sam’s ashen skin.

Dean didn’t hesitate. He floored it, swearing, and Sam closed and locked the back door, sliding mutely into the passenger seat and staring down at his spattered hands, eyes wide and unfocused. Behind them, the zombies that had been tailing the Impala fell upon the old man like buzzards on carrion, screeching and tearing and fighting to get the last scraps. Some part of Dean was briefly, worryingly relieved, but that was swiftly crushed by sharp, overwhelming guilt. That, too, was thrown into the padlocked box, and Dean licked his dry lips as he tried to formulate a plan.

They’d lie low a while. Find a good, strong house to hole up in. It was hurricane season, right? Most of the houses around here were bound to have hurricane shutters or something. And houses have food. They’d need food. It’s not like the owners would come back and get angry if the house was abandoned, right? They could find a good house, get comfortable, and then see where it went from there.

Dean hadn’t realized that he’d been muttering to himself until Sam spoke up, voice almost distant as he mumbled, “Has to have a garage.”

“What?” asked Dean, eyes darting from one side of the street to the other, wary of zombies and looking for the perfect place.

“So they don’t steal the Impala,” said Sam, lifting his gaze from his hands and looking out into the streets. “The house needs to have a garage.”

Dean frowned, looking askance at his younger brother. “Who the hell’s gonna steal the damn Impala, Sammy? I don’t think zombies know how to hotwire a _car_.”

“No,” Sam quietly replied, turning his haunted eyes on Dean, “but other survivors might.”

Neither of them spoke much, after that.

 

* * *

 

 

The house they found was perfect. It had steel bars over the windows and sturdy locks, and—aside from the one zombie wandering around in the garage—it was entirely abandoned. Dean dispatched the zombie and dragged it outside onto the neighbour’s yard, and broke into that house while he was at it for supplies, which was when he learned that kicking doors down looked a _lot_ easier in the movies. (Less pulled hamstrings, for example.) He gathered what he could while Sam rounded up the food and supplies the brothers already had in the first house.

“Show me what’cha got, Sammy,” Dean said as he heaved the last of the cans and dry cereal from the house next door into the one they’d claimed.

Sam looked up from the floor of the dining room, eyes still as empty as they’d been earlier. “Candles,” he replied, shaking a large plastic bag at Dean. “Most of them are tealights or votives, but I found a big scented one in the bathroom. The water’s still running, by the way.”

“Cool,” said Dean, and then he paused, frowning. “You didn’t drink any of it, did you?”

Sam frowned right back. “I’m not stupid, Dean.”

“I know you’re not, Sam,” Dean replied, crouching to empty out his latest bag. “I just wanted to make sure, is all. What else y’got?”

Only partially mollified, Sam set the bag down and pointed to each item in turn. “Lighters, matches, a pack of gum, duct tape, electrical tape, Ziplocs, garbage bags, batteries, and a fishing kit. You?”

“Got us a portable propane stove, some propane, salt, vinegar, bleach for the water, and a machete that smells a lot like coconuts, for some reason.”

“Did they have a coconut tree in their back yard?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s why it smells like coconuts.”

Dean squinted across at his younger brother and frowned. That was Sam’s usual condescension, but without any of the usual snootiness that Dean frequently heard along with it; in fact, it was almost monotonous. Concerned, Dean made a mental note to keep an eye on his younger brother. Both of them jumped when a ringtone warbled from the bottom of one of John’s bags, and as they shared a look, comprehension dawned on both of their faces: the satellite phone.

 _Uncle Bobby_.

As one, they scrambled for the bag and fumbled with the zipper, Dean muttering, “Come on, come on, come on,” and Sam hissing, “Get it, get it, _get it_!” Once Dean located the bright yellow brick of a phone (bought solely because they’d all seen _Jurassic Park III_ one too many times), he mashed the green call button and pressed the phone to his ear, voice an octave too high when he all but shouted, “Hello? Uncle Bobby?”

“ _Dean?_ ” came a familiar, gruff voice from the other end. “ _Is that you, boy?_ ”

“Yeah,” said Dean, sagging with relief against Sam and grinning when his little brother’s eyes lit up. “Yeah, it’s me. Are you okay? Where are you?”

“ _Never mind that_ ,” said Bobby, and Dean could almost picture the man’s scowl. “ _Where are_ you _? Where are Sam and John?_ ”

“Sam’s right here next to me,” Dean hastily replied, offering the phone to Sam so his brother could briefly say hello.

“Hey, Bobby,” Sam quietly said, cradling the phone against his ear as though it were a precious thing. “Yeah, I’m okay. Dean’s with me. He’s okay, too. We’re in a house. Where have you been?” There was a long pause in which Dean heard the deep warble of Bobby’s voice garbled through the phone, and then Sam jerkily offered the phone back to Dean, looking away toward their supplies.

Dean sighed as he took the phone from Sam, pressing it against his ear again. “Hello, Bobby?”

“ _He didn’t make it, did he?_ ” Bobby rumbled in his ear, not at all unkindly.

“He… No,” Dean quietly replied, running his fingers through his hair. “Just us.”

“ _Shit_.”

A startled laugh punched out of Dean, humorless and almost pained. “Yeah.”

“ _Where are you? Did you make it to the Keys?_ ”

“Nah,” said Dean, starting to help Sam organize their belongings. “We’re in Miami.”

“ _Christ_ ,” muttered Bobby, and by the muffled sound of his voice, Dean could tell that he was rubbing his hand over his face. Bobby took a deep breath, making the line crackle just the slightest. “ _Listen up, Dean. I’m all the fuck way up in Saskatchewan, so it’s gonna take me a while to get to where you are_.”

“Sascatty _what_?” asked Dean, face pinching in a frown.

“Saskatchewan,” Sam tonelessly supplied. “He’s in Canada.”

“ _He’s right_ ,” said Bobby, and Dean heard rustling on the other end of the line. “ _Depending on the conditions, it’ll probably take me at least a_ week _to get there, probably two or more between walking, gas runs, switching cars, and fighting these bastards along the way. Panic tends to make people run, and the interstates are probably clogged up with abandoned cars and Lord knows what else, so I’ll have to take the scenic route_.”

“Yeah,” said Dean, scooting a can of Spaghetti-O’s over to Sam’s stash and smiling when his brother’s lips quirked up. “Check in every now and then, alright?”

“ _I will_ ,” Bobby brusquely replied. “ _Every Monday night, around six o’ clock. Keep the phone close and the ringer low._ ”

Dean smiled at his uncle’s tough guy act, knowing it was barely masking Bobby’s worry. “We will.”

“ _Good_ ,” said Bobby, and his next words were spoken harsh and low, in that no-nonsense tone that always made Dean sit up a little straighter. “ _Keep your heads down, Dean. And_ keep moving _. Don’t get too comfy. You put your paddle down on Shit Creek and you’ll be screwed when you hit those rapids_.”

“Yes, sir,” Dean replied, nodding despite the fact that Bobby couldn’t see him.

“ _Good_ ,” Bobby repeated, and in the background, a woman screamed over the sound of glass breaking. Bobby swore. Creatively.

Dean sat up all the more, panic making his heart throb. “Uncle Bobby?”

Bobby didn’t seem the least bit perturbed when he said, “ _I’ve gotta go, Dean. I’ll call you. Take care of Sam_.”

 _Click_.

Dean pulled the phone away from his face and stared down at it, watching the Call Duration numbers wink up at him before settling back into the home screen. When he looked up, he found Sam’s pale face pinched with a sick sort of worry, and Dean pulled himself back together. “He’s _fine_ ,” he said, rummaging in John’s bag for the belt clip of the satphone and firmly fastening it to his jeans. “He said he’d call us on Mondays. He’s gonna be _fine_. Do you want this can of Spam?"

 

* * *

 

 

They spent over a fortnight in the surrounding houses, moving as quietly as possible and tacking bedsheets over the windows so that no light from their candles could bleed through to the outside at night, since the electricity shat out entirely by day three. It was tough to find good places to hole up in; when they looked at houses, either fires had hollowed them out, they were still full of (what was left of) the residents that had been chowed on, or there was a car in the middle of the fucking living room. They put themselves through their paces twice a day, exercising as silently as they could and practicing their aim with a set of cheap dollar store rubber dart guns that Sam found under one of the beds. They were unstable, though, so the Winchesters passed the hours upgrading and modifying them until they could deliver consistent straight shots. They gave up on finding houses with garages in Miami—it was a rarity, and the Winchesters wrote the first house off as a one-time deal. Instead, Dean draped tarps over the Impala and hoped for the best, tying empty food cans to the insides of the doors and dropping a gumball into every other can when he found a stash of them being used as a centerpiece.

The Winchesters had a sort of system: pick a house, clean the house of any unsavory sorts (meaning zombies), deck the house with boughs of booby traps and barricading, and stay put until it was time—usually within a few days—to pack up and move camp again. The trickiest part, of course, was moving the Impala without bringing a horde of zombies running like it was mess call. Several times, the brothers resorted to pushing her along, with one or the other popping into the driver’s seat to adjust the steering around car wrecks and into driveways. They took turns keeping watch at night; that way, both of them got rest, but neither of them felt vulnerable doing it.

Sam slowly recovered, bit by bit. He wasn’t a hundred percent back in the game, but he smiled a little more, joked a little more, and Dean treasured every little laugh and crease of the eyes. The phone calls they got from Bobby helped a lot, despite the setbacks that their uncle experienced. By week two, he’d only made it to an area near the border between South Dakota and Nebraska; apparently, avoiding the interstate and major highways was a tremendous pain in the ass, especially when the engine in his latest car flooded in the middle of fucking nowhere. Still, it was a balm to their nerves to hear a friendly voice on the other end of the line.

The trouble started when the water ran out. One day, a week into their shifting about, while Dean was filling a pot with tap water to boil and bleach for drinking, the water pressure weakened from a torrent to a drizzle, from a drizzle to a drip, and from a drip to bone dry. Sam said that it was a miracle that it had lasted that long, but it still didn’t solve their newest problem: they now had to make ‘water runs’. Some houses had stashes of water bottles, but with the impromptu evacuation, not all of them did, and more often than not, Dean found himself having to drive further and further away to hit abandoned convenience stores and drug stores for food and water.

Convenience store gas stations turned out to be the best source for gas, not because of the pumps—which unfortunately needed electricity to run—but because there were several abandoned cars all around them, and if Dean ignored the smears of sun-dried blood and gore marring their paint jobs, he did a pretty alright job draining them of gasoline with a hand-powered siphon pump that John had always kept in the trunk of the Impala. It was a beautiful day in mid-July when the Winchester brothers decided to leave the Impala behind and walk the short distance to the nearby CVS, backpacks on their backs and weapons at their waists. Their latest base camp had a posh little two-car garage, and the sun wasn’t as harsh as usual—it was perfect weather for a walk, and they’d been getting cabin fever anyway.

They ventured out of the house on the corner of southwest 23rd and 25th, and from there, it was only a block and a half before they could cut across the parking lot and creep in past the broken glass of the drug store, whereon Dean almost ate the floor and Sam almost ruptured something trying to keep his laughter in. Quietly as they could, they combed through the store from top to bottom, finding only a zombie behind the counter of the pharmacy and another in the bathroom. When those were dispatched—and the wood between the nails in their baseball bats was wiped clean—the boys split up; Sam went into the pharmacy for first aid supplies, and Dean went on the hunt for food and other supplies like juice and bath wipes (since both he and Sam were starting to smell the kind of ripe that not even deodorant could ease).

In and out in ten minutes or less; that was the drill. They timed themselves on their cell phones, setting silent, vibrating alarms: the first alarm was set for five minutes to urge them along, and then another alarm had them dropping what they were doing to regroup when they hit the nine minute mark. This time, they were in and regrouped in seven minutes. Sam had gotten ahold of penicillin and albuterol—“For Uncle Bobby,” he said, and Dean didn’t have the heart to say a word against it—and Dean had managed to find a can of sliced peaches among the wreckage inside the store for Sam.

Having to pry it out of a dead woman’s hand was entirely worth seeing his little brother smile.

“You ready to go?” Dean whispered, tugging his backpack higher up on his shoulders and adjusting the lay of the straps so the weight was evenly distributed. That was another rule: never carry more than you could run with.

“Yeah,” Sam replied, tucking himself under Dean’s outstretched arm.

Dean gave his little brother a bracing squeeze and then let him go, leading the way out through the front door. They were cautious, as always; things could change at the drop of a hat, and just because the parking lot had been zombie-free when they got there didn’t mean it’d stay that way. But the coast, as it were, was clear, and Dean helped Sam hop over the jagged edge of the broken glass door and out onto the pavement beyond. No sooner than they’d taken a handful of steps away did a guttural noise behind them make both boys stop cold, turning around as one to face the lone, questing zombie that had shuffled out from around the corner of the CVS, near the door.

For an instant, caught in the open, neither boy moved.

And then the zombie’s unnaturally pale eyes swiveled onto them, bloodshot and unblinking, and it snarled and broke into a high-speed shamble, impeded only by its obviously-broken leg.

“Go go go go go,” chanted Dean, grabbing Sam’s shoulder and pushing his brother before him as they started to run, his other hand taking a good grip on his bat. Halfway down the parking lot, however, there came a sound that turned Dean’s blood to ice in his veins: the maelstrom of noise that came with a ravenous horde of zombies, keening and churning and gnashing away behind them.

“Dean,” said Sam, voice wavering with terror or the impact of his feet hitting the pavement—Dean couldn’t tell which.

“Just keep running,” Dean replied, jerking to a stop and whirling around to take out the nearest, shambling zombie with a swing of his bat. Around that same corner, a multitude of zombies were tripping over themselves in their haste to get to their food, and Dean swore as he turned back around, hightailing it after Sam.

Too many. There were too many of them. Dean had never seen that many before, not even back at the hotel. Even if they could reach the house, even if they could outrun the zombies, there was no guarantee that the zombies would just go away. How did they even hunt? Could they smell? If they could, then he and Sam were _screwed_.

Sam had stopped running.

He stood, silent, at the end of the parking lot, looking toward the nearest street corner. Dean almost screamed at him to move, until he, too, heard the noise that had made Sam go still: the roaring of an engine. A gleaming grey Toyota Tacoma—he’d know any car on sight, by now—screeched to a stop just in front of Sam, and Dean was stunned to see a young woman standing in the truck bed like an angel of deliverance in a Batman tank top and black pleated miniskirt, shotgun cocked and aimed behind him.

“Let’s go, assholes,” she bellowed, expelling shell after used shell as Sam scrambled up into the truck bed with her, “I ain’t got all day!”

Dean didn’t need to be told twice. He threw his bat onto the bed before him, taking the woman’s proffered hand and using it to haul himself up onto the bed beside his brother. As soon as he was in, the woman smacked the roof of the Tacoma’s crew cab and dropped down onto the bed as it tore away from the parking lot, hissing as one of the nails on Dean’s bat caught on her leggings and tore clean through to the flesh.

Both brothers froze.

Seemingly oblivious, the woman growled something that neither Winchester could make out, standing up and flinging Dean’s bat into the window of a car they were driving past. The brothers flinched as that set off a blaring alarm, and then watched in fascination as the woman ignited several half-cans of soda filled with something black and a fuse. As she hurled them into the middle of the street, it became clear that they were homemade smoke grenades, and a noxious-looking cloud of black smoke soon filled the street behind them before they turned a corner and disappeared from view.

When the woman turned around, Dean had his Glock trained between her eyes. She stopped moving, the goggles she wore gleaming beneath the rim of her ball cap, and then—wonder of wonders—actually snorted at Dean, black-tinted lips curling up in a smirk. For the most part, she ignored them, sitting down on the truck bed and taking off her tank top (which was covering a smaller top so yellow that they almost squinted) to wrap it around the gash in her leg.

“I’d put that down if I were you, twinkletoes,” she said in a voice that was rough as Joan Jett’s when she tied off the knot, stretching out and almost lounging as though they hadn’t all just nearly made an afternoon appointment with Death. "You shoot me, you earn yourself a one-way ticket off this soul train.”

 _Twinkletoes_? Dean frowned, gesturing at her with his gun. “You got cut on my bat. I killed a zombie with that thing. Won’t you get, y’know, _infected_ or some shit?”

“Nope,” the woman replied, tapping the toes of her boots together as she leaned back on her hands. “Don’t advise it for you, though. You’d go zed in fifteen, twenty minutes, max. Don’t put nails in bats, by the way. Rookie mistake. They get caught in skulls and fuck you over when you’re dealing with more than one walker.”

After a beat of silence from the Winchesters, Sam shifted in place and asked, “Why won’t you?”

“Simple, peaches,” she said, referring to the can that Sam still clutched tight in his hand. Reaching up, she pushed her goggles up onto her brow, tipping the rim of her ball cap up and revealing washed-out, violently bloodshot eyes. “I’m already dead.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so fucking sorry that I took this long to update. Life has been a bitch and a half. I hope you'll forgive me with this update!


	4. Living Dead Girl

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The sad part about this fic is that I planned to have it all written out and posted last year. The good news is that I'm in uni again, so yay, higher education! Oy.

Only Dean’s impeccable trigger etiquette kept him from shooting her dead on sight, heart clenching tight as he stared into those eerily alert eyes he was so used to seeing on mindless zombies. “And what the fuck is _that_ supposed to mean?” he demanded, free arm stretching protectively in front of Sam.

“Beats me,” said the woman, putting her elbows up on the top of the Tacoma’s tailgate and shrugging. “All I know is I was dead on D-Day and wasn’t the next day.”

Sam reached across his brother and gently but firmly lowered Dean’s gun arm, ignoring his brother’s hiss of his name. “What do you mean by ‘dead’?”

In lieu of a response, the woman tilted her head back and to one side, baring her throat to the Winchesters. On the left side of her neck was a gnarly, softly pink scar, almost indistinguishable from her incredibly pale skin. (Dean would have figured she was bloodless if he hadn’t just seen her bleed.) “See that?” she prompted, the backs of her fingers tapping against her scar before her head swivelled back up and she coolly looked them in the eyes. “Got my jugular bitten outta me a couple weeks ago. Bled out. Know I did, cos that shit’s still all over my kitchen floor and, obviously, I ain’t as dead as I should be, am I?”

Despite Sam’s hand on his arm, Dean kept his fingers firmly around his Glock. “So, what? Are you taking us both back to your place for a little _Nazino affair_?”

The woman’s brows lifted, and it was then that Dean realised that her hair wasn’t just so pale that it was blending into her skin; she didn’t have any hair at _all_ , from her scalp to her eyelashes. “I don’t know what the fuck a _‘Nazino affair’_ is, but I’m gonna use good ol’ context clues and assume you mean that I’m gonna go _Hannibal_ on you. Nah, son. We’re not gonna hurt you.”

“’We’?” asked Sam, frowning.

The woman snorted and gestured toward the Tacoma’s cab. “What, did you think the truck was drivin’ itself? S’cuse me a second.” As they watched, she stood up again and held onto one of the grip bars someone had screwed onto the sides and bed of the truck, smashing the boot of her injured leg into the face of an incoming zombie the Winchesters had never even seen coming. The impact sent its head snapping back and soundly broke its neck, effectively turning the zombie into a limp dishrag.

“Fuckin’ nasty-ass flies,” she grunted as she set her foot down again, sliding her goggles back down over her eyes as the zombie’s body rolled to a stop behind them. “Don’t get too comfy, boys. We’ll be home soon.”

 

* * *

 

Their angel’s _Kingdom of Heaven_ turned out to be pink.

Very pink.

Shenandoah Middle School Museums Magnet towered over their heads as the Tacoma pulled up to the parking lot, tarp-covered fence gates sliding open automatically as they turned in. As they passed, the Winchesters saw that the gates weren’t automated, but were in fact being closed behind them by two men with guns strapped to them, and there was another young black woman in a short, pastel floral dress standing at one side of the parking lot with a rifle tucked awkwardly over her heavily pregnant belly.

The moment they stopped, the undead woman hopped out of the truck bed and went up to the cab, popping open one of the back doors and cooing, “Hey, Sammy. You okay?”

Sam and Dean shared a look before following suit, though Sam very purposefully left his nail-bat behind.

As the undead woman messed with what seemed like a car seat, a third, dark-skinned woman slid out of the driver’s side of the car, shrugging an assault rifle onto her shoulder and grinning brightly at the Winchester brothers. “Hey,” she said, tugging her tri-colored ponytail out from under the rifle strap with a hand that glittered with a wedding ring. (She’d dyed her hair blonde with pink tips, and her brown roots were coming in. Dean thought it made her head look like Neapolitan ice cream in a way that immediately made her likeable.) “Sorry about the rough ride. You boys okay?”

Both Winchesters were distinctly aware of how grimy they were in comparison to this peculiar bunch of survivors, so neither was the least bit offended when the woman didn’t offer that hand to shake. “We’re alright,” said Dean with a smile, wrapping his arm around Sam’s shoulders. “Thanks for saving us back there.”

“No problem, honey,” said the ice cream woman, setting her hand on her hip and looking at the boys with kind, playful eyes that strongly reminded Dean of Mary. “I’m Clara. Clara Brighton. My son Ethan’s inside.”

“I’m Sam,” said the younger of the brothers.

“And I’m Dean,” said the elder. “Sam and Dean Winchester.” A sudden, sharp inhalation to the side had them all turning their attention to the men who had closed the gates.

The taller of the two towered over them and was almost entirely bald save for a scruffy little mohawk of brown hair, his sun-darkened skin covered in tattoos from head to toe. He had lidded, murky hazel eyes like swamp water made all the more striking by the black ink that surrounded them; his entire face was tattooed to look like a skull, and Dean found it just as fascinating as he did intimidating. He was wearing a baby bag strapped securely across his shoulders, and Dean could see a can of formula peeking out from one of the pockets.

The shorter man had apparently been the one to gasp, and it only took an instant of eye contact—his wide eyes were startlingly blue against his sun-tanned complexion—with Dean for the man to frown and turn on his heel, striding toward the school as his scruffy black hair whipped about in a sudden gust of wind that swept across the parking lot and briefly brought them relief from the hot summer sun.

Dean frowned; that man had looked like he’d seen a ghost in the split second before he’d bitchfaced at him. What the fuck was his problem?

“Way to be an asshole, Cas,” called the undead woman as the man disappeared, startling both brothers back into looking at her. She now had a tiny, dark-skinned girl on her hip in an animal-print summer dress, deep brown eyes blinking up at them almost warily from beneath her matching sun cap. She clung closer to the undead woman as she approached the Winchesters, and the undead woman shook her head. “Sorry about that,” she said, setting her hand at the back of the infant’s head. “Cas can be a bit of a weirdo sometimes. Your name’s Sam, too?” The last was asked with a tiny nod in Sam’s direction, and the boy smiled, almost pleased.

“Yeah,” he said, looking up—the woman was tall—into her eyes. “Samuel. I was named after my grandfather.”

For the first time, the woman smiled (revealing mercifully normal human teeth), gently bouncing the baby at her hip. “Well, Sam, meet Sam. Samar Otrera. I’m Katherine Otrera-Artiles. Call me Kat. Pleasure’s yours, trust me.”

Both brothers snorted, and despite his lingering wariness, Dean said, “Hey, I’m really sorry about your leg.”

Katherine waved a hand dismissively, settling it on Samar’s back and rubbing between the baby’s shoulders. “Don’t worry about it. That big palooka behind you is our medic, Zeke. The pretty little lady over by the fence who’d probably roll if she fell over is his wife, Emma. You already met Clara and Castiel, and we got three other folks inside. It ain’t much, but now you’re here, and this is the safest you’ll get.”

“Thanks,” said Sam, elbowing Dean between the ribs to urge his brother to do the same. “How’d you get everyone so clean? The water ran out a while back.”

“Ah,” said Katherine with a sagely nod, “that’d be the wonders of baby wipes and rubbing alcohol for the tough stains. Works every time.”

Behind them, the tall, tattooed medic spoke up, nodding to Katherine’s leg. “Need me to take a look at that?” he asked, his voice so surprisingly deep that the Winchesters both twitched with surprise.

“Nah,” said Katherine, tugging at the knot in the shirt she’d tied around her leg. The Batman logos on the shirt and her leggings were stained with blood, but there was nothing but a thin, deep red scratch left where the gash had been, baffling both Sam and Dean. “It’ll be gone by tonight.”

Zeke shook his head. “I don’t know how the fuck you do that,” he muttered, stepping around Katherine to help get canvas bags out of the truck cabin.

“Magic,” Katherine replied, tone taking on an air of sarcastic quotation as she took a canvas bag onto her shoulder and headed toward the school. “And if this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating.”

Sam frowned thoughtfully as he followed; Dean only frowned.

“Shakespeare?” Sam asked after a moment, catching up with Katherine while Dean caught up with him, tucking a hand over Sam’s shoulder.

“Yup,” said Katherine, looking down and along at Sam as she adjusted her hold on Samar. “Nice job, kid. You picked that right up.”

Sam smiled, and Dean’s frown only darkened. “Yeah, well... I was kind of a big reader before...” Suddenly looking uncomfortable, Sam gestured widely, more a flap of an arm than the graceful arc he’d probably meant it to be. (And he’d meant it to be; Dean could see his wince.)

Katherine chuckled, deep and thoroughly amused. “Before the shit hit the fan,” she supplied.

“Yeah,” Sam awkwardly agreed, “that. Then. Yeah.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” said Katherine, jogging up the side steps of the school and in past a large, heavy gate of iron bars. “There’s a library across the street.”

“Is this a school or a prison?” asked Dean, turning to walk backwards and looking around at the sturdy iron bars in each of the viewing windows cut out of the building’s thick concrete.

Katherine snorted, turning right and heading down the wide, comfortable hallway. “A school that had to make it through hurricanes. Every entrance into this school has a gate like you just walked past, and each one is locked with a minimum of three thick steel chains and an iron rod that goes down several inches into holes made into the concrete. You won’t find a safer place than this motherfucker for miles.”

“I can believe it,” muttered Sam, now joining his brother in marvelling at all of the iron—iron gates, iron doors, iron bars in each of the cut-outs in the concrete that passed for windows. The lattermost had tarps and garbage bags heavily taped into place that kept all but the smallest slivers covered, as likely to keep zombies from seeing any snackables from the street as to give any shooters sniper holes.

They made their way to the end of the short corridor, turning toward a double set of double doors on their left and watching as Katherine hauled one open. It was immediately apparent that this had been the old cafeteria, with dingy frosted slats for windows and the majority of the long tables folded and set against the wall in a way that reminded both Sam and Dean of times that they’d attended school dances, save that two of the long tables had been kept out, though vertical to the doors instead of horizontal as was custom. The whole place smelled of charcoal and woodsmoke, but not in a cloying way that made it difficult to breathe; obviously, they kept this place well ventilated.

There was only one person sitting at a table right now—a young boy likely no older than seven, if that. He’d looked up from his coloring book the moment that the doors opened, and when he shook his shaggy brown hair out of his eyes and caught sight of Katherine, he beamed, shouting, “Kat!” and scrambling to get out of the contraption that was the school lunch table.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Skeeter, whoa,”  chuckled Katherine, holding up a hand and staying the boy as she approached and crouched beside him, the bewildered brothers trailing behind her like hesitant ducklings. “Settle down. Mami’s outside, safe and sound. I need you to do me a favor and look after Sammy while I take these two guys to get cleaned up. Can you make sure she eats her applesauce for me?”

The little boy immediately sensed the importance of his task, and straightened up a little. “Want me t’get the foody chair?” he asked, eyes flickering from Katherine’s face to the Winchesters and back with poorly-disguised curiosity.

“Nah, I’ll get it,” said Katherine, smiling and ruffling the boy’s hair as she stood. “I gotta see a man about some cans anyway.”

“That’d be helpful,” rumbled Zeke as he all but glided past the group with his load of canvas bags, making Sam and Dean near about jump out of their skins.

Katherine snorted. “You’ll get used to that. Huge, but quiet as anything and with a voice like a mountain come to life. It’s terrifyin’ at first, but you’ll start to find him weirdly comforting. Everybody does.”

“Yeah,” said Dean, squinting at both Katherine and Zeke dubiously, “sure. If you say so.” With a shrug as if to say ‘suit yourself’, Katherine turned to follow Zeke into what seemed to be the cafeteria kitchen, leaving the Winchesters standing awkwardly in the cafeteria proper with the little boy, whom had taken to staring openly at them both. Dean tried a smile, though he knew his teeth were less than minty fresh and made it only a small one. “Hey,” he said down to the boy. “My name’s Dean. This is my little brother, Sam. What’s your name?”

Before he spoke, Dean felt he already knew who the kid belonged to, though he was made certain when the boy smiled a smile like Clara’s and said, “My name’s Ethan. Where’d you come from? Did you see anybody else outside? Did you see any dogs? Is your name really Sam like the baby’s?”

Dirty teeth be damned, Dean couldn’t help but grin. One glance at Sam as he crouched told him that his brother was as delighted by this young boy’s effusive welcome just as much as he was bewildered by it; it felt like it’d been a decade since they’d last seen a happy child. “Yeah, his name is Sam,” said Dean, “we came from a few blocks over, we didn’t see any people, and... we didn’t see any dogs, either. Sorry, buddy.” Dean didn’t have to force sympathy at the boy’s crestfallen expression at first, though he did wonder why Ethan looked relieved at the end.

Apparently, so did Sam. “You don’t like dogs?” he prompted, leaning forward so his hands were on his knees.

Ethan shook his head, looking up into Sam’s eyes. “They try to eat you, too.”

Neither Winchester knew what to do with that information.

Thankfully, Katherine saved them further awkwardness by appearing, wheeling a large plastic feeding chair over to Ethan and shifting it onto its lowest setting. Samar was carefully sat and strapped in, and Katherine gently lifted her chubby little arms as she slid the feeding chair’s table home beneath them. Dean straightened up as Katherine softly cooed to the baby, sliding the sun cap from her soft black hair and snapping a bib around her neck. When Samar was all settled, Katherine turned and carefully hauled Ethan up onto the lunch table, setting two containers of baby food beside him and handing him a tiny plastic spoon as reverently as a holy sword.

“You know what to do with this, right?” she murmured, looking intensely down at Ethan.

Ethan made a show of bowing as he accepted the spoon, somehow managing to keep from falling headfirst off the table. Then he grinned up at Katherine and cheerily said, “Yep!"  
  
Katherine grinned back down at Ethan, reaching up to ruffle the boy’s hair and saying, “Thanks, Eeth. I owe you one.” While Ethan beamed with pride, Katherine looked toward the Winchesters and cocked her head toward the door. “Follow me, boys.” So saying, she sauntered over to the double doors and slipped out, holding them open just long enough for the Winchesters to hurry through behind her.

As the door swung shut, Katherine headed up a set of stairs directly to their left, leaving the Winchesters to follow her up—one less enthusiastically than the other. About a dozen steps, a small landing, and another dozen or so steps later, they found themselves on the second floor, and the Winchesters were startled by what they found. Apparently, the second floor was more exposed to the elements than the first floor, and the larger, floor to ceiling cut-outs only sported railings tall enough to keep the average person from going over the edge. It left the school much more exposed, and the inhabitants of the school more at risk of being seen by zombies below.

The survivors, however, were incredibly resourceful. To combat the insecurity of the railings, they’d tied plywood securely in four positions each to the bars, leaving only small viewing slats between them—wide enough for the survivors to look out, but not nearly wide enough for anyone (or anything) in the streets below to see them walking freely. Even Dean was starting to feel impressed with them all, which was sorta sad, in the grand scheme of things—being impressed by drilled plywood being strapped to a middle school’s railings with twist ties, rope, and fabric.

But that was the way that the world was now, he reckoned. Sam mentioned a few weeks ago that it was only now that he truly understood the meaning of ‘gratitude’. Dean kinda agreed. He thanked God for every water bottle He put in Dean’s path, and every little domino that had been laid in their path since the outbreak in order for them to get to this point. He tried not to think about all of the millions of people who hadn’t gotten these same chances—the same millions that were milling about the city in hordes and scattered prowlers.

Looking back on it now, he realized that they’d been lucky. Dean’s theory that the zombies were following their prey inland had been shaky at best, but he’d turned out to have been right; on the fringes of the city where he and Sam had holed up in, there had been very few zombies, the rest likely lured in by the car horns and alarms that had provided a constant and sometimes maddening distraction for days after the zombies showed up.

Now, as he walked along the corridor of the short wing of the school and turned onto a hallway that seemed to be impossibly long, Dean gingerly reflected upon luck, survival, and the annoyance of car alarms, until Katherine stopped by another set of double doors and opened one up for the boys to step into the room beyond. Sam—damn his trusting nature—walked right in, and Dean frowned and hurried behind him, hand on his Glock.

It… was a library. A handful of windows in the far back let light flow into the room, illuminating shelves full of books and tables full of clothing and supplies. Katherine sighed as she stepped in, removing her cap and goggles and turning to face the Winchesters. As they suspected, she was completely bald from her head to her eyebrows to her lashes, and those eerie pale eyes looked unnervingly alert and human—at least, they were unnerving to _Dean_ ; they were essentially at the mercy of a real-life fucking Voldemort, and he didn’t like it.

Sam, of course, was forever contrary. “Cool,” he breathed, and Dean rolled his eyes behind his brother as he heard the grin in Sam’s voice.

One corner of Katherine’s lips tweaked up, and then she gestured to the Winchesters with one gloved hand. “Strip.”

For a moment, neither brother moved. But then, of course, Dean’s mouth couldn’t have been expected to hold out for long. “ _Excuse_ me?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at Katherine as he tugged a baffled Sam closer to protect him.

Katherine lifted a brow, plucking her gloves off. “You heard me, pretty boy. Strip.”

“No,” said Dean, tucking a bewildered and newly anxious Sam behind him. “Go fuck yourself.”

“Dean,” hissed Sam, but Dean ignored him, focusing instead on the half-zombie _thing_ in front of them.

Katherine sighed. “Look, kid. Y’all smell so damn bad, I can’t tell if you’ve been bit, and I ain’t lettin’ you stay and use up our goods if you are. You either strip, or you get shown the door.”

Dean’s teeth grit. How dare she? How fucking _dare_ she give them this safe haven and then threaten to take it away in the span of ten minutes? His hand tightened on his gun, and he very nearly considered walking right back out onto the street. But then he felt Sam’s hand on his, holding him back as he always did when Dean’s protective hackles were raised for his benefit.

“It’s okay,” Sam whispered behind him. “Dean. It’s okay. Let’s just do it. You know we’re clean. C’mon. Just put the gun down and take your shirt off.”  
  
For a moment, Dean struggled to tear his gaze away from Katherine, and then he was looking down into familiar, pleading hazel eyes, and Dean frowned. “You’re sure?” he asked, voice gentling for Sam’s benefit.

“Yeah,” his little brother replied with a nod, stepping away from Dean and peeling off his filthy t-shirt. Dean still didn’t like it, but he complied, flicking his eyes warily toward Katherine for every article of clothing both he and Sam shed.

When they were done, they turned to face her, and the look on her face could only be described as sympathetic as she tugged a pair of blue latex gloves on. “Tighty-whities, too, boys. Sorry.”  
  
“Oh, come _on_ ,” Dean snapped, crossing his arms over his chest. “This is more than enough.”

“Nope,” said Katherine, gently popping the ‘p’. “I need you two buck-ass naked. I can’t risk either of you having a bite somewhere unlikely and it comin’ back to bite us literally in the ass. Trust me, I don’t wanna do this any more than you do.”

Dean snorted, giving Sam a bracing look and awkwardly shimmying out of his underwear. “Sure you don’t,” he muttered, cupping his hands over his junk and facing Katherine with a scowl beneath flushed cheeks. Behind him, Sam nearly fell when stepping out of his underwear, he was so mortified. Dean had to dart a hand out to catch Sam, momentarily leaving part of his goods exposed as his other hand twitched closer to Sam.

Miraculously—to Dean—Katherine’s eyes stayed locked on his face, the knuckles of one hand on her hip and her free hand lazily gesticulating. “What, you think I want any part’a you? Sorry, pretty boy. I browse the menu, but I don’t eat shit. I’m sure you were very popular before everything went t’ hell, but you don’t do nothin’ for me.” As she spoke, Katherine took up a few crinkly green packets of what looked to be wipes and a spray bottle full of pink liquid from a nearby table, approaching the Winchesters when she finished and unceremoniously starting to spray them down.

“Hey!” shouted Dean, and then he twitched and lowered his voice, hissing, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? What the fuck are you spraying us with?”

“What does it look like I’m doin’, Winchester?” Katherine drawled, peeling open a package of wipes and offering each of them one of the unusually thick cloths. “Makin’ sure you meet our company’s quality standards. It’s hospital-grade soap stuff. I have to make sure you don’t infect the kids.”

“C-Can’t we do that ourselves?” asked Sam, squirming away from Katherine’s spraying and then steadying himself when he glanced at Dean and noted that his discomfort was cranking up the little red bar on Dean’s Murderometer.

Yet again, Katherine sighed, lifting her eyes to Sam’s from where she’d been focused on spraying his legs. “If you got in trouble, your brother’d cover for you, right? And you’d do the same, I bet. Even if y’got bit.”

Sam pursed his lips. “Point taken,” he mumbled, flicking what he hoped was a pacifying look up at Dean and starting to scrub where Katherine had already sprayed.

Meanwhile, Dean was _really_ starting not to like this place. He muttered obscenities beneath his breath as he reluctantly started to wipe himself down,  nearly jumping out of his skin when Katherine set her cool, filmy, gloved hands on his skin and examined him and Sam with more thoroughness than was strictly necessary, in Dean’s opinion. He insisted on them doing things themselves, trying to spare both him and Sam further embarrassment and mostly succeeding. But when Katherine discovered that they both had a mild infestation of lice and brandished a comb, resignation sank into his bones, pulling all of his breath out of his body in a long sigh.

This was turning out to be one _long_ day. He just hoped it would be worth it.


End file.
